Data Protection and Backup Issues for Mid-Sized Businesses

In this competitive landscape, data is growing seamlessly at a rapid pace. This explosive growth of data coupled with limited budgets and resources is impacting mid-size businesses, which do not have the required infrastructure for meeting the challenging demands of data storage. Another concern is managing distributed data, i.e. data of remote or branch offices. This data is way beyond the reach of your main backup infrastructure and thus, is at risk. Further, backing up all mission-critical data, results in downtime and lost productivity. These factors are making it difficult for the organizations to accelerate growth.

Organizational data loss can occur in a variety of ways, including catastrophic disk failures; virus attacks, hacking attempts, and more. If your data is being backed up on tapes and those tapes go out of the secure data center environment of your organization, you are potentially heading for some big trouble.

Problem with Mid-Size Businesses

Any business, small or big, is doomed to face data loss at some point in time. While organizations constantly plan strategies to secure themselves against catastrophic data disasters, mid-size businesses do not utilize their existing resources to protect themselves from these risks. They do not enforce a proper backup strategy for their mission-critical data. Besides lack of budget, a major problem with normal and mid-sized businesses is lack of proper planning and initiatives for growth.

They need to continually test their ability to recover data from new systems and new applications. In addition, they should keep track of the changes that take place throughout the business year and make sure the business continuity plan is in sync with those changes. This can be achieved by creating a test environment that is based on the changing business requirements.

Backup Strategies for Mid-sized Businesses

Mid-size businesses have a lot of options when it comes to backing up data. They can either use a tape based infrastructure or go for a disk based infrastructure. They can also choose from online backups (to make data retrieval always available) or offline backups (for retaining data for longer periods). Further, they can take advantage of the duplication technology to reduce the required storage capacity as well as sophisticated encryption technology to continuously protect your business assets.

Data Loss and Implications

Data loss may have negative implications for mid-sized businesses. It can make any organization go out of business. The consequences of data loss can be financial, i.e. inability to complete transactions leading to loss of revenue. Moreover, regulators may charge penalties, if you are not able to revive the business within a certain period of time. The second major impact is on the reputation of the company in the marketplace.

The strategies for managing business risks help to prevent data loss from happening in the first place. However, if your business has suffered data loss, you should take help of various data recovery solutions available on the market. Using professional data recovery software, you can recover every piece of lost or deleted information from your data center assets. These tools support scanning of enterprise-grade hard drives having more than 2 TB storage capacities.